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Studio news. And you thought we were just sitting here.

We've had another one of those weeks. Or three. On the 13th, and in conjunction with Portland International Jazz Festival, McIsaac joined a panel (moderated by Tim DuRoche) to review the history of the Blue Note album cover artwork library, largely focused on the design work of Reid Miles. He was joined by author Ashley Kahn, whose forthcoming book, titled Somethin’ Else is poised to become the authoritative work on the history of the seminal jazz label. Blue Note music producer and archivist Michael Cuscuna provided relevant historical color, and jazz critic Josef Woodard rounded out the panel quartet.

On Tuesday, the 17th, AIGA Portland hosted a panel discussion that centered on surviving the current economic downturn. Moderating the panel was Julie Beeler, Principal of Second Story Interactive Studios. Panelists included Steve Sandstrom from Sandstrom Partners, Sean O’Brien from Wieden+Kennedy, Ryan Buchanan from eROI, Mary Kysar from Makelike, Steve Potestio of 52 Ltd., and branding and marketing specialist, Scott Niesen. See the full transcript of that event at Bespoke.

Due to delayed flights, we were just under the wire in returning home to Portland for Monday's inaugural class with Portland State University's continuing education program, Producing Digital Media. Pinch is working with the class to structure the syllabus around a Web redesign effort for one of our most treasured resources, Portland Center Stage. We're progressing the idea a bit further in that we're approaching it as a community effort for a collaborative community resource, with Pinch managing the affair and aligning Portland Center Stage and students with our favorite professional partners in Web design and development, online and audio branding, animation, social media, and SEO. We'll see how it plays out, but we (and others) are planning this as a new business structure with measurable benefit and broader goals. To track and share the progress, we will develop a site to share the story. And if you're in Portland, you'll likely being seeing more in the press about this project. It appears to have grown wings.

In other client work, we're in the closing stages of wrapping a new Joomla! site for (previously mentioned) Smith & Fong, and we kicked off our next phase work plan with Metro's Multifamily Recycling project. On extremely short notice, Pinch went strong at winning a rebrand RFP for Deschutes County Library with our pals from happy, inc. We just missed the cut. None of us were entirely surprised, given the language of their RFP, but we were a bit disappointed. As Yogi Berra uttered, "if you don't know where you're going, chances are you'll go somewhere else." Fair enough. That aside, we were pleased to learn that Pinch is one of two finalists for the Oregon Council for the Humanities rebrand, a project that we feel we're perfectly suited for. We have a new manuscript in the house for Hawthorne Books and Literary Arts and we're considering the possibilities of another book with photographer, Steve Scardina. Along with Kate Raphael, previously of Pyramid Communications, we begin a new communications plan and identity guidelines for Portland Parks Foundation and on-going projects with Forest Park Conservancy. New client work has begun with strategist Cate Millar and Oregon Wave Energy Trust, which marks a project of significant interest for our little firm.

Perhaps most satisfying, we launched the initial identity materials for the Oregon Trout rebrand, now referred to as The Freshwater Trust. With their game-changing StreamBank program, as well as aggressive education initiatives with The Healthy Waters Institute, and ongoing restoration with the merger between Oregon Water Trust and Oregon Trout (which now, as a program is focused primarily on stream restoration to benefit fish), the organization is firmly positioned to tackle the larger issues related to freshwater, our planet's most important single resource. We'll write this project up in further detail, and will add it to the Works section as the week progresses.

As you may have noticed, we partnered with our pals at Substance to host Show and Tell PDX, an opportunity for those working in design, technology, and the arts to share their efforts. We are pleased to be part of the advisory team charged with considering the making of a design museum in Portland. And we continue the community work with this month's Designspeaks featuring Andrea Marks and her film history of the social, cultural, and political dialogue of the Polish posters from WWII through the fall of Communism, titled Freedom on the Fence. Keep an eye out for the debut of The Slant Six this coming Friday at Bespoke, which marks six of the most interesting musical tracks that we're currently listening to in the studio. And if that weren't enough, we're closing in on wrapping our first round of The Straight Six; six questions that tap some of the most interesting people in design, typography, sustainability and brand development.

Show and Tell PDX: A call for entries.

Along with our friends at Substance and the FlashPDX User Group, we invite you to join us for an evening of show and tell. We know that you have been working diligently on the next big thing, and we want to give you the opportunity to brag about it a bit. So, on Tuesday, March 3rd at 6:30 pm, at Substance, our little collective will be hosting an event where you can come and share what you’ve been whipping up.

The idea is simple; we’re looking for people to share a short presentation on something they have been working on and then, of course, to tell us about it. Plan for about 10 minutes on stage. We hope you'll share ideas, designs, code, art, film, and whatever you might be interested in showing (and telling). We’d love to see new speakers, and yes, we'll expect the usual suspects will want share their work, as well.

We plan on getting started around 6:00, with drinks and music. We'll begin the program at 7:00. The event will be held at Substance World Headquarters, 1551 SE Poplar Ave, Portland.

If you’re interested, send us your idea on what you’d like to present by Thursday February 26th and we will sort through the best of 'em to curate what we're sure will be an interesting evening. Send your ideas to:
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
and we will start the conversation.

We’re looking forward to you joining us for an informative, enlightening, and entertaining evening.

On the week at Pinch. And it's only Wednesday.

We've had a good week at Pinch. As we mentioned at the beginning of the month, we were anxious to get to work and that work began by reaching out to friends, clients and prospects. Those efforts have begun to bear fruit, and we couldn't be more excited by the quality of the organizations who are, in turn, seeking our assistance.

Our brand development work with Oregon Trout and Smith & Fong in San Francisco is some of the more fulfilling work that we've tackled in some time. We expect to announce the launch of the newly redesigned Smith & Fong site in fairly short order. And the new brand language, name, and visual identity for Oregon Trout will be unveiled at the end of February.

We were pleased to learn yesterday that we had been awarded the Metro Multifamily Recycling contract, particularly given the stiff competition from around the region. A multitude of very good firms were in the hunt for that work. The week has also provided inroads to good people within organizations for which we maintain great respect; Vancouver's Formos (developer of StreamBank), Oregon Wave Energy Trust, and Oregon Council for the Humanities to name just three. We hope to assist in their varied project development efforts, as well.

The kind words continue to flow with regard to the Pinch site redesign, for which we're quite proud. Like painting a bridge, it's a continual work in progress. At this point we can say that the primer has been applied. And during the writing of this post, we just learned that Bespoke (our little rant space) has been added to Alltop, Guy Kawasaki and Nonomina's collection of top-shelf news feeds from around the world in design. It's good to be considered in the same company as Josh Rubin's Cool Hunting, Design Observer, and Zeldman's various properties.

We hope your week is progressing with the same level of promise. And if not—as we did for so many weeks—we would encourage you to take heart. It's only Wednesday.

New work: various projects for Fios.

Last Friday, we delivered a new capabilities brochure to Portland-based Fios, Inc., a pioneer and leader in the electronic discovery industry. Electronic discovery, for the uninitiated, is the process of gathering, cataloging and compiling legal evidence into a searchable electronic form for attorneys' use. Fios does the grunt work, but also shows its clients how to set up procedures to retain information in a logical and discovery-useful way.

We've been working with Fios for over a year now in kind of a "back-door" brand development exercise consisting of various collateral, Web and trade-show-related projects; those projects and the capabilities brochure are shown in greater detail here and here. If you're interested in what back-door brand development is, you'll have to wait a bit until we get the Fios case study posted. It ain't anything we invented, anyway.

The brochure was written by Timothy Leigh, photographed by Michael Jones, and printed in six match colors on FSC-certified paper (Mohawk Options) by the newly-FSC-certified Dynagraphics here in Portland.

New work: AIGA Urban Forest project submission

Pinch is honored to have been selected to participate in the Portland chapter of AIGA's Urban Forest Project. The effort, modeled after a similar program run by the New York chapter of AIGA, involves the creation of banners by twenty area designers, each using the form of the tree or a metaphor for the tree to make a visual statement to accompany a series of events during the week of Earth Day. Following public display, the banners will be recycled into tote bags and sold at auction, with proceeds going to Friends of Trees, a local non-profit dedicated to urban reforestation.

Pinch's submission creates a typographical forest from the Latin names of the various species of tree used in urban forests, along with pithy facts about the role trees play in the urban ecosystem. The small type is not meant to be read when the banner is hung from the lamppost, but will come into its usefulness when the banner enters its second life as a bag.